A Sketch a Day with Illustrator

When your job is to create lots of drawings on a daily basis, you almost never get yourself to practice drawing again,” says freelance illustrator Takeshi Terayama (@takeshiterayama), who is based in Fukuoka, Japan. Inspired by a fellow illustrator friend who manages to keep up with his sketches every day, Takeshi started to get into the habit of making daily drawings using a croquis book and a black dermatograph pencil. Sharing his work on Instagram has also helped make the habit stick. Every evening between dinner and bedtime, Takeshi spends anywhere from five minutes to two hours drawing motifs that come to his mind. “I don’t have any specific theme,” he explains, “but it’s boring to draw models and images that are already art-directed by someone else.” While many of his subjects come from his personal photos and scenes from documentary films, he admits that his baby son is the best model — especially when he’s out of ideas. “I plan to continue my drawings for a while, because I want to find out where this will lead me.
Although he is fully committed as an illustrator, Takeshi likes to work his creativity in another hobby he is passionate about, which is cooking. “I wanted to become a chef when I was little,” he says, adding, “I’ve been cooking since I was in first grade, and my experience with cooking is actually longer than my career as an illustrator.” He likes to be in the kitchen so much, that he even shares his cooking photos and recipes online. “If you want to know how much I love cooking, I’d say that my mind is full of recipe ideas all the time — from when I’m taking a bath to those moments when I get in bed and think about things until I doze off into sleep.